BORN TO DANCE
Author: Juliet Prowse
Publisher: Prowse Media
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
“With her superbly drilled company, glittering visual stagecraft and Vegas all-star professionalism, her opening night was more than a success, it was a resounding victory. South Africa should be proud of their dynamic daughter”. Doug Gordon, Rand Daily Mail 1976 on Juliet Prowse and her show in SA.
What a gift to have such a sparkling showwoman in your family and what an honour to be named after her! Her namesake niece, ‘Little Juliet’ has not taken this gift, nor this honour, lightly. In Born to Dance, she has lovingly and diligently unpacked the life of her dynamic dancer ‘Aunt Julie’ and wrapped it in a spangled, star-studded story. From her birth in Bombay to her death in Los Angeles in 1996 just days before her 60th birthday. What’s in between is nothing short of breathtaking. Not just for her meteoric rise to stardom and relationships with so many other big names in the firmament along the way, but for commitment to her craft and her vision as a professional in the entertainment industry. No small thing for a woman in 60’s and 70’s America.
The narrative is that the Born to Dance journey began when niece Juliet spotted a ‘little red suitcase in her parents’ attic ‘filled to the brim with articles about her famous aunt’. It exploded when she unearthed the ‘treasure trove of 640 letters written to her mother Phyllis between 1954 and 1980. (The moral of the story is never throw away a letter! Nor underestimate the value of having a strong and loving relationship with the recipient). Anyway, Little Juliet (who has used her own legs not for dancing but running) has displayed equal commitment in piecing together every last detail of Big Juliet’s career and personal life, largely first hand, through the words found in the letters written with the sort of naked honesty that you only really find folded into envelopes.
Of course, show stoppers are the engagement to Frank Sinatra, the affair/flings (if that’s not too disrespectful a term) with Elvis and Warren Beatty (to drop a few), and professional encounters with Michael Caine, Diana Ross, Rock Hudson, Bob Hope, Margot Fonteyn, Laurence Olivier – not to mention performances to thousands strong audiences in Vegas and London, including Queen Elizabeth at the Royal Variety Show, Edinburgh 1985.
In the big picture Born to Dance reads like a who’s-who and what-was the entertainment industry of the time – think Mame, Sweet Charity, Can-Can etc – the challenges, the costs, the competition. But on a personal level, it highlights the personality of one very unique, determined and talented woman – her individual style, her generosity, her attraction – endless legs and exotic looks – her sometimes flawed and vulnerable love life, her care for her family, colleagues and her company, not forgetting her own costs, physical as well as financial. That she was still dancing, partly into her first and only pregnancy, and then into her forties, it’s not surprising that her body paid the price. Heartbreaking to read that towards the end, after the curtain had fallen, she sometimes had to be carried off the stage.
Ironically, although Prowse is claimed as ‘dynamic daughter’ of South Africa, and although she visited family here quite often, she only brought her show here twice in the 70’s, in the difficult days of apartheid – interesting that she invited some disallowed black guests to watch from the wings. Because Big Juliet is part of entertainment history now, there will be generations of young, up-coming stage wannabees who will never have heard of her, but it doesn’t mean they can’t learn more than a lesson or two on how to live and perform with every inch of your body and soul. Well done to Little Juliet for putting her extraordinary aunt back on the map.